Born in Hanoi, Vietnam, he was educated there, completing his baccalaureate at 17. In 1936, he continued his studies in France, becoming a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure where he wrote a dissertation for a diplôme d’études supérieures on Hegel. In 1943, he completed his agrégation with a thesis on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, being received premier ex aequo alongside Jules Vuillemin. Through the 1940s, he worked on his first book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. The book argued that the defects of the phenomenological account of consciousness could only be remedied by the Marxist account of labor and society. In the 1940s and 50s, Trần Đức Thảo’s ideas achieved some currency among the elite philosophical circles of France. At the same time, he became an active anti-colonialist, publishing articles in Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s journal Les Temps modernes about colonialism in Indochina; these articles were read by Frantz Fanon and other anticolonialists. From October to December 1945, Trần Đức Thảo was jailed by the French government as a threat to its security. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism was published in 1951, and in the same year he returned to Vietnam, working in support of the Communist Party. In 1956, he was named the Dean of History in the country’s first national university.

But he became critical of the Party over land reforms which had led to many deaths in 1956, and Trần Đức Thảo was caught up in the Nhan Van-Giai Pham affair in which the dissident intellectuals of the late 1950s were publicly criticized or punished. Though Tran Duc Thao was never jailed, he fell out of favor with the ruling Party, publishing two self-criticisms in Nhân Dân and leaving his position of authority in 1958. None of his work was published in his home country from 1965 until 1987. For the next thirty years, his profile was lower, as he worked in the rural provinces translating philosophy into Vietnamese and preparing his book Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. This book, published in France in 1973, combined materialist biological and cognitive accounts of subjectivity and consciousness with the Marxist account he had elaborated earlier. In the liberalized political climate of the 1980s, he was able to return to France for medical treatment, and there he met many of his old philosophical colleagues again, although he lived in poverty in an apartment at the Vietnamese embassy. He died in Paris in 1993 and was cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

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Lao Tzu’s wise counsel attracted followers, but he refused to set his ideas down in writing. He believed that written words might solidify into formal dogma. Lao Tzu wanted his philosophy to remain a natural way to live life with goodness, serenity and respect. Lao Tzu laid down no rigid code of behavior. He believed a person’s conduct should be governed by instinct and conscience.

Lao Tzu believed that human life, like everything else in the universe, is constantly influenced by outside forces. He believed “simplicity” to be the key to truth and freedom. Lao Tzu encouraged his followers to observe, and seek to understand the laws of nature; to develop intuition and build up personal power; and to use that power to lead life with love, and without force.

Legend says that in the end Lao Tzu, saddened by the evil of men, set off into the desert on a water buffalo leaving civilization behind. When he arrived at the final gate at the great wall protecting the kingdom, the gatekeeper persuaded him to record the principles of his philosophy for posterity. The result was the eighty-one sayings of the “Tao-Te Ching.” This ancient Chinese text is the world’s most translated classic next to the Bible.

Here are some of his famous quotes:

Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of happiness.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.

He who knows others is wise;
He who know himself is enlightened.

He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.

I have three treasures. Guard and keep them:
The first is deep love,
The second is frugality,
And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world.
Because of deep love, one is courageous.
Because of frugality, one is generous.
Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world.

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.

People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.

The best [man] is like water.
Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in [lowly] places that all disdain.
This is why it is so near to Tao.

The more laws and order are made prominent,
The more thieves and robbers there will be.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.
Through this I know the advantage of taking no action.

The Way of Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure.
The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.

To be worn out is to be renewed.

To have little is to possess.
To have plenty is to be perplexed.

To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

To produce things and to rear them,
To produce, but not to take possession of them,
To act, but not to rely on one’s own ability,
To lead them, but not to master them -
This is called profound and secret virtue.

When armies are mobilized and issues are joined,
The man who is sorry over the fact will win.

When the highest type of men hear Tao,
They diligently practice it.
When the average type of men hear Tao,
They half believe in it.
When the lowest type of men hear Tao,
They laugh heartily at it.
Without the laugh, there is no Tao.

When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty,
There arises the recognition of ugliness.
When they all know the good as good,
There arises the recognition of evil.

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1. Chinese proverbs